1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to the field of image processing.
2. Description of Related Art
Scanners and other types of image capture devices have become ubiquitous office productivity tools for generating electronic images of physical original documents. Once an electronic image of a physical original document has been generated, the electronic image data can be used in an infinite variety of ways to increase the productivity and product quality of an office. Such image capture devices include desktop scanners, other standalone scanners, digital still cameras, digital video cameras, scanning input portions of digital copiers, facsimile machines and other multi-function devices that are capable of generating electronic image data from an original document, and the like. These image capture devices can also include image databases that store previously captured electronic image data.
However, as the cost of scanners and other image capture devices has dropped and the output quality of the captured electronic image data has improved, the amount of data produced by the image capture devices has gone up dramatically. Similarly, as users have become comfortable with capturing and using electronic image data obtained from original documents, the amount of scanning has gone up dramatically.
Additionally, methods of concurrently or multi-tasking or parallel processing of methods and data are well known in the prior art such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,229,790 to Gilliland, et al, U.S. Pat. No. 5,557,795 to Venable, U.S. Pat. No. 4,847,751 to Nakade et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,371,887 to Yoshida et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,466,061 to DeSantis et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 4,847,755 to Morrison et al., each incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Related methods for processing image data have taken the image data and processed it for speckle removal, sharpness, rotation, skew, color clarification and other methods in a linear process essentially handling all of the data at once, then upon completion, freeing up the scanner and/or image processor to receive new data. This was acceptable as long as the amount of image data to be processed was relatively small. With the advent of the ever-increasing number of features provided by image capture devices, the amount of image data generated by the image capture devices is creating an unacceptable wait between initial scanning and final image completion, such that the scanner or image capture device is not available for significant periods of time.
This invention provides systems, methods and apparatus that process the image in a multi-tasking, multi-threaded way such that the scanner is quickly freed up to begin the next scan operation.
In a first embodiment of the systems and methods according to this invention, the processing systems and methods include all mandatory processing methods that are deemed necessary for processing every image.
In a second embodiment of the systems and methods according to this invention, the processing methods include an analysis of the image for processes that may be recommended or optional to be applied to any particular image.
These and other features and advantages of this invention are described in or are apparent from the following detailed description of various embodiments of the systems methods and graphical user interfaces according to this invention.